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U.S. and Soviet
spooks studied paranormal powers to find a Cold War advantage
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The Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) is well known for pushing the boundaries
of science and technology in search of ways to give the U.S.
military an edge—robotic pack animals, self-navigating
vehicles and plant-based jet fuel, to name a few. Less well
known is the agency's Cold War-era investigation into how
paranormal phenomena like extrasensory perception might be
used by the U.S. to get a leg up on the former Soviet Union
and, perhaps more importantly, by the USSR against the United
States.
Working with Washington, D.C., think tank
RAND Corporation, DARPA determined that paranormal research
by the Soviets focused on physical science, engineering and
quantifiable results, whereas their U.S. counterparts tended
to be psychologists looking instead to explore the human mind.
The bottom line, according to a 1973 DARPA-commissioned study
entitled "Paranormal Phenomena": "the U.S.
has failed to significantly advance our understanding of paranormal
phenomena."
As Halloween approaches, the report serves
as a reminder of our fascination with paranormal forces (for
more on this, visit Sciam.com's "Science of the Occult"
in-depth report). The authors were worried that the Soviets
might win the race to use the supernatural to its advantage
much as they had threatened to win the space race decades
earlier when they launched Sputnik. "If paranormal phenomena
exist," RAND analysts P. T. Van Dyke and Mario L. Juncosa
concluded, "the thrust of Soviet research appears more
likely to lead to explanation, control and application than
[does] U.S. research."
The authors acknowledge that the study was
limited, because it was based on but a sampling of works available
at the time. Among them: a decade of abstracts from the parapsychology
section of Psychological Abstracts, a print version of the
PsycINFO abstract database of psychological literature. They
knew even less about Soviet efforts, they admitted, noting
that their conclusions on that front were based on a "somewhat
impressionistic" sample and "some not always reliable
and frequently imprecise reports of Western visitors to the
Soviet Union."
Soviet research on telepathy dates from the
early 1920s when a program was established at the Institute
for Brain Research at Leningrad State University. The Soviets
appear to have been fascinated with telepathy, which they
called "biological communication," as a ship-to-shore
way of communicating with submarines without using electronic
equipment. They also considered training their cosmonauts
to develop and use precognitive abilities to "foresee
and to avoid accidents in space."
It seems the Soviets also were
quite taken with the possibility of psychokinesis (using
mental imagery to move objects) as a way of "disrupting
the electrical systems associated with an ICBM's [intercontinental
ballistic missile] guidance program."
The Soviets were more inclined
than American scientists to believe that paranormal phenomena
might be the result of "bioenergetics," or the
energy given off by the metabolic processes of living things.
This theory stated that people exuded "bioplasma,"
(a theoretical energy field) that, under certain conditions,
was capable of emitting charged coherent radiation beyond
the body surface in the form of electrons and possibly protons.
Although the Soviets did not
reach a consensus on the existence of bioplasma, RAND concluded,
"the very pursuit of this theory indicates that Soviet
parapsychologists were attempting to explain alleged paranormal
phenomena with a greater degree of specificity than their
Western counterparts."
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